We built Wetarseel with a focus on keeping the "mental overhead" of infrastructure as low as possible.
The Hardware: > We’re using a single Hetzner VPS (8 vCPU, 32GB RAM, 200GB NVMe) for ~$25/month. Compared to the big cloud providers, the vertical scaling headroom here is massive for the price.
The Stack:
Orchestration: Coolify (self-hosted PaaS). It handles SSL, GitHub-triggered Red/Blue deployments, and Docker management.
Runtime: Next.js and Bun.
Database: SQLite. Having the DB as a local file on NVMe makes latency negligible and simplifies backups (it's just a file copy).
Workers: BullMQ via Redis.
Storage: Self-hosted S3-compatible storage on the same node.
The goal was to see how far we could get before needing a distributed system. So far, the performance has been excellent, and "it just works." Happy to answer any questions about the setup or the trade-offs of going single-server.
> I’m typing this blog on a HP ZBook Ultra G1a 14. Question to HP, who names this crap? Why do these companies insist on having the most confusing product lineups and names.
The reason is that they are not serious companies, this is why anything other than a real macbook and with a real macOS is not worth having spent time on.
Beware of pocketbase! I am running my startup wetarseel.ai. You'll be badly locked into one instance with one sqlite file, plus its queries are not mapping to SQL, try a bulk delete and it will choke your entire system, plus other footguns.
I grew up learning Flash and started my love for programming due to ActionScript 2 then 3, is there anything like this today I am looking for something for my 10 year old daughter.
not at all, Shadcn has been a game changer for all young, bootstrapped and individual developers. Who now have a professional looking UI available for free and easy to use.
There are echo chambers and availability biases, it takes a bigger person to know that they live in one.